It is known in the art to use a printer connected to a computer system to print documents and to connect a portable hand-held device to a printer to print documents.
Printing from phones typically requires a smartphone, i.e., a device resulting from the combination of a cellular telephone and a personal digital assistant, class of phone facilitating the print formatting and print driver. This requires special applications loaded into the phone in order to print on the printer. Additionally, phones require either wired connections, e.g., USB, serial, or parallel, etc., or wireless connections, e.g., infrared or Bluetooth, etc. Problematically, not all phones are smartphones having IR or Bluetooth connectivity capability.
A network printer in a public location, such as a print kiosk in a shopping mall, typically includes an IP address identifying the printer on the network. However, the network address, e.g., formatted as a period separated sequence of numbers such as 192.167.1.1 using Internet Protocol (IP) version 4 addressing and as a colon separated sequence of numbers typically including eight groups of 4 hexadecimal digits, such as 3ffe:6a88:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344, is not conducive to entry using a typical mobile device as neither a colon nor a period are typically found on telephone keypads.
Additionally problematic, printer software appropriate for the network printer must be installed in the mobile device in order to enable printing from the mobile device to the printer.